Color displays made using different technologies, or even those of the same technology, often have different primaries and thus different color gamuts. To ensure consistent rendering of an image across different displays, standard color communication protocols such as those promulgated by the International Color Consortium (ICC)—ICC color profiles—may be used to specify how to convert from an image's “native” color space to the target display's color space. In practice, however, some displays either do not support color management or do not support the full ICC specification. (See ICC specification ICC.1:2010-12 (Profile version 4.3.0.0), which is technically equivalent to ISO 15076-1:2010.)
Wider gamut systems, often newer on the market and designed with an awareness of the need to be compatible with older devices, mostly support some form of color management so that images with an attached color profile can be properly displayed. For still images without a color profile, current prevailing practice is to assume they are to be rendered for the sRGB color space. In this way most of the commonly available images can display properly on newer wide-gamut displays, though not taking advantage of the expanded color gamut.
To actually have colors that take advantage of a wide-gamut display, images need to be rendered for the wider gamut during the image's capture so that saturated colors are not clipped. If an image rendered for a wide-gamut display is shown on an sRGB display without color management however, the image's colors will appear desaturated. Herein lies the difficulty with maintaining backward compatibility, especially during the commercial transition period when there is a mixture of systems on the market (e.g., sRGB and wide-gamut displays), all of which do not support proper color management.